Wait – was he talking about the UN or the Putsch administration?

Right. In English, we call that “contempt.”

And this is who the Bush administration chooses as our representative?

Says the guy who used the delightfully witting name “Steve LaBoner” not four hours earlier

Fixed – Pammy chasing Bolton’s mustache

Pammy? Is that you?

Not that you’ll accept anything that conflicts with the Republican’t propaganda you’re so intent on catapulting – but maybe others can be edumacated on the subject.

Well, there’s this:

Apologise or we’ll cut your funding, US envoy tells UN

AMERICA’S bitter dispute with the United Nations escalated last night when John Bolton, the US envoy to the UN, threatened to withhold funding to the organisation unless it apologised for the remarks of a senior British official.
Speaking at the Centre for Policy Studies in London, Mr Bolton assailed Mark Malloch Brown, the British Deputy UN Secretary-General, for the disparaging remarks he made about the American public this week. “Mark Malloch Brown has a sentence in his speech where he says the role of the UN is a mystery in Middle America,” he said.

“Maybe it is fashionable in some circles to look down on Middle America, to say they don’t get the complexities of the world and they don’t have the benefit of continental education and they are deficient in so many ways,” Mr Bolton added. “It is illegitimate for an international civil servant to criticise what he thinks are the inadequacies of citizens of a member government.”

Funny how it’s illegitimate when somebody else does it, but when Bolton says that North Korea and Iran are terrorist nations, criticising what he thinks are the inadequacies of citizens of a member government, it’s okey-dokey…

And this:

[snip]

Mr. Bolton began his tenure with an argument over the preparations for a gathering of heads of state. He demanded that the summit document omit, among other things, references to the anti-poverty Millennium Development Goals, on the ground that these had been interpreted by U.N. officials to include a commitment to more foreign aid. Mr. Bolton’s action alienated other U.N. ambassadors with no obvious gain; such commitments, even if accepted, are non-binding.

Mr. Bolton’s handling of the new U.N. Human Rights Council was equally clumsy. He failed to show up at nearly all of the 30 or so negotiating sessions leading up to the council’s creation, then waded in at the eleventh hour with a bizarre proposal that the State Department quickly repudiated. Mr. Bolton’s spokesman says that the ambassador engaged in good faith throughout the process. But U.S. allies felt that Mr. Bolton did not do so.

Mr. Bolton has embarrassed himself most recently by his mishandling of U.N. management reform, a cause supported by U.N. officials and the richer member states. Mr. Bolton came up with the idea of threatening to cut U.N. funding unless the management reforms were adopted, and his spokesman insists that this brinkmanship was helpful. But South Africa’s U.N. envoy called it “poison”; Germany’s ambassador called it “wrong”; his British counterpart said it was a mistake to hold the budget hostage. After six months the budget threat was dropped.

We see little evidence here that Mr. Bolton is good at “working multilaterally.” Rather than building support at the United Nations, Mr. Bolton has more often solidified the anti-American coalition. We continue to believe that the president is entitled to the ambassador of his choosing, provided that the nominee is competent and honest. But we can’t explain Mr. Voinovich’s change of mind, nor why Mr. Bush supposes that this polarizing envoy advances U.S. interests.

And this:

[snip]

As Chris Dodd summed it up at Bolton’s latest confirmation hearing last month: “When the score is tallied on the effectiveness of Mr. Bolton at the United Nations, I think he receives a failing grade… Mr. Bolton has largely burned his bridges with his colleagues in New York and isn’t likely to be an effective diplomat when diplomacy is increasingly becoming the coin of the realm in protecting and advancing U.S. interests at this very unstable moment in our history.”

And no failure has been greater during Bolton’s time at the UN than his utter lack of interest in the defining foreign policy of the Bush administration. When it comes to the war in Iraq, Bolton has been AWOL. “John Bolton hasn’t done anything on Iraq,” a UN diplomat told me. “This is no exaggeration. Iraq is not on his radar screen. He doesn’t have a single person dedicated just to Iraq.”

[snip]

And then there was the time he chased a female down the halls of a russian hotel, throwing crap at her, pounding on her hotel room door, and generally threatening her on a constant basis for two weeks. There’s some prime Republican’t diplomatic material for ya.

So, yeah – other than trying to bully the UN, making unilateral demands while supposedly conducting diplomacy, using incendiary terms to describe other nation’s rulers while throwing a temper tantrum when somebody says something bad about the US, already being considered a sociopathic nutjob before Putsch and the Republican’t junta back-doored him into the UN ambassador position, and acting like an arrogant arsehole while supposedly trying to improve diplomatic relations between the US and the rest of the world, there was no problem with Bolton’s UN ambassadorial tenure…

>I see. So you’re suggesting that Mr. Bolton thinks he knows far better than all those assembled diplomats what is best for each of their countries and the world. Smells like contempt to me.

Er, yeah, I wasn’t suggesting that Bolton doesn’t have contempt for UN that exists today. He clearly does. I was suggesting that he might not have such contempt if the UN lived up to what he wanted it to be. Is it somehow presumptuous of him (and me) to think that if the UN were effective it would have been able to do something to stop what happened in, say, Darfur? You seem to be suggesting that to judge the UN by its actions (or lack thereof) is somehow bad..? Why?

Yeah, Jay is the guy to go to for the high-minded rhetoric (“…the Democratic babies in the Senate decided to filibuster the vote”).

John Bolton:
“If you think that there is any possibility in this country that a 51,000 person bureaucracy is going to be supported by most Americans, you better think again. The Secretariat Building in New York has 38 stories. If you lost 10 stories today it wouldn’t make a bit of difference. The United Nations is one of the most inefficient inter-governmental organizations going. UNESCO is even worse. And others go down hill from there. The fact of the matter is that the international system that has grown up, and again, I leave out the World Bank and the IMF because I do think that they’re in a separate category, has been put into a position of hiring ineffective people who do ineffective things that have no real world impact, and we pay 25% of the budget.”

I was waiting to see if Oliver had some other quote that he drew his conclustion from, but he hadn’t responded and you asked. (Also I think Oliver has some pride issues with admitting that he’s wrong about something to someone who disagrees with him politically, but thats neither here nor there.) Now, would anyone still like to claim that Bolton was wishing for the building to be destroyed? It really doesn’t seem debatable to me.

Maybe because it was better that Hezbollah no longer had an operating military. Seems as it stands now that was the way to go. It has nothing to do with parroting anything. It has to do with results.

So you’re suggesting that Mr. Bolton thinks he knows far better than all those assembled diplomats what is best for each of their countries and the world.

Actually, he suggested no such thing. I swear, people around here are wonderful at reaching conclusions for other people. John Bolton simply happens to be one of the few people that recognizes what a corrupt and bureaucratic institution the place is. I’ll channel you guys: Apparently, you have no problem with a country like the Sudan having a seat on the Human Rights Commission and you’re perfectly ok with the rampant corruption within the oil for food program.

So yes, that is wishing for the building to be destroyed. Google it if you dare.

Grow a brain, if you can.

Anybody yet going to take a stab at how Bolton was an “unmitigated disaster?” Or how about a nutjob? Or a sociopath?

Or is that kind of rhetoric par for the course?

I believe the point of the filibuster is to say “No.”

I see. So you’re suggesting that Mr. Bolton thinks he knows far better than all those assembled diplomats what is best for each of their countries and the world.

Smells like contempt to me.

Oh, I see. That’s very different.

Well, no, it’s not different at all. I just thought I’d make an attempt to humor you. Seriously Jay, what’s the difference between having contempt for the UN and having contempt for the “institution” of the UN?

Wrong at the time? Because sometimes a little more shooting helps the two sides work things out?

Jay, could you possibly parrot the Bush line a little more transparently?

See what happens when you don’t read the whole post, kids? >blush<